FAULTLINES

By the time my maternal grandparents arrived in 1932, my father’s family had already been in St. Louis some 35 years. Like those who migrated north, both before and after them, they found a city burgeoning with commerce, replete with manufacturing jobs, economic opportunities previously unknown to them. But they also found a city in turmoil, an increasingly diverse tapestry of settlers and immigrants in the midst of reconciling itself to its changing identity.

In 1917, there had been labor riots fueled by racial tensions just across the Mississippi River in neighboring East St. Louis, Illinois—a boomtown known for its cheap coal, slaughterhouses and aluminum production. With African Americans landing jobs with companies like American Steel and Aluminum Ore, job and wage security as well as rumors of race-mixing set off nearly two months of violence. That bloodstained offensive on black newcomers still stands as one of the worst this country has ever known. The NAACP estimated that some two hundred black people were left dead and another six thousand burned out of their homes. White residents fled in droves over the next 30-40 years, sequestering themselves in “sundown” towns.

Detailed in Jonathan Kozol’s book Savage Inequalities, the tiny township where I spent many of my early years and carefree summers, never recovered economically and now many of its social structures and public institutions lay in ruins. It was once said that if you cannot find a job in East St. Louis, you cannot find a job anywhere. Today, with an ever-shrinking population of around 27,000, East St. Louis is 98% black and is marred by environmental degradation, violent crime and pervasive poverty—among the highest rates in the country.

The same tragic story of a black-white divide unfolded in a remarkably similar fashion across and beyond the Poplar Street Bridge that connects the St. Louis metropolitan area.

Until the early 1970s, restrictive housing covenants were widespread. There were neighborhoods—whether codified in law or in practice—where blacks were not allowed to live, work or socialize after dusk for fear of arrest or worse. The wrought-iron gates still standing in the Central West End are painful reminders of those bygone years. Some of those boundaries included entire cities and townships. White St. Louisans—including first and second generation Italian, German, Polish and Irish immigrants, carved out sections of the city for themselves, away for the rush of black immigrants who hailed from the rural south.

Until he died in1943, my maternal grandfather Josup—a former minstrel show performer and gravedigger from Huntsville, MS– worked in a coal refinery. My uncle Jimmy swept floors at an automotive plant. Uncle Ross was a doorman and pumped gas at a full-service station near Forest Park for 30 years. His wife, my aunt Gerry, was a line cook at a country club. There were few jobs they could have and even fewer places they could live. Back then, there were only two colored high schools—Vashon and Sumner.

Separate and unequal, long thought to be a relic of the old south, was alive and well in St. Louis. Jim Crow, it seemed, had cousins up north. It was nothing short of an American apartheid.

In time, discriminatory race-based laws were dropped from the books only to be replaced by a new, a tragically flawed social contract—its defining geographical lines shifting and moving in tandem with black economic progress. That evolving social contract, despite the eradication of Jim Crow-inspired sundown laws, was imbued with self-segregation and remains one of the most divided big cities in the nation, according to a study conducted by Brown University. Driven by both white fear and black economic flight, metropolitan St. Louis expanded to encompass farmland redeveloped into affluent suburbs—many areas of which remain 97% white. Today, there remains marked self-segregation even within the city limits.

It has been said that the civil rights movement skipped St. Louis. How civil your rights were depended largely on the money in your pocket. African Americans who were able to build pathways to financial success relocated to close-in suburbs–as my mother did when she moved my siblings and me from an East St. Louis housing project to a small rented house in all-white St. Ann, Missouri in 1974, the year after my father was murdered, and enrolled us in the Ritenour school district. We returned to East St. Louis for a time, before living in Ferguson where I attended once all-white Normandy High School—the same school Michael Brown graduated from just a few months ago. Many left the city altogether, as we later did, leaving behind a gully of poverty in its core.

However, as the availability of affordable housing and meaningful jobs grew, that line began to stretch further into north St. Louis County. A drive along Martin Luther King Drive, which turns into St. Charles Rock Road at the city limits, tells the story of another Great Migration. The numbers were marginal at first, then more pronounced. St. Louis County is now 24% black. Still, a sense of calm persisted.

And, until now, that paper-thin social contract—rife with social injustice—held that peace.

For too many, including my family, that meant living in silence with the realities of over-policing, racial profiling and red-lining, never really mounting a fight against the confines of social and economic injustice with any fervor. It meant never seeing the ballot box as a meaningful mechanism for substantive change. Until Ferguson, there were few if any national human rights leaders focused squarely on St. Louis, organizing and agitating for change.

Until now, there was no Justice Department investigation into the discriminatory practices employed by the St. Louis County police department or any of the 90 related jurisdictions for that matter. There was no effort to recall a local mayor or demand the firing of his police chief, and very few challenges to a county prosecutor who has held office for over 20 years. There were no feet on the street and certainly no media presence. Visiting journalists, including several of my colleagues got a taste of what it is like to defy—even if passively– local police.

When I first picked up reports from social media about a “police-involved shooting” and began tweeting witnesses for details even as Brown lay dead and uncovered in the street, few had ever heard of Ferguson. I sent the first of several “hot notes” to my producers at MSNBC around 5:30pm that Saturday, just after the close news programming. They responded immediately, adding other producers, editors and reporters to the e-mail string. Soon media from around the globe descended on St. Louis.

No one was watching, until now.

The death of 18-year-old Michael Brown has ripped proverbial scabs off of a myriad of festering sores. While the facts of the case deserve unbiased and transparent investigative scrutiny and all the rigorous questioning that can be mustered in the confines of a courtroom, what is happening in my hometown is larger than that and reaches back and through a troubled history that began to unfold long before he was born. To witness and participate in collective acts sparked by Brown’s death, in St. Louis, on social media and around the country is as much about his life before his was shot six times and left lying in the street as it is about how politicians and law enforcement—from the White House to Jefferson City to Ferguson City Hall– have responded. It spans well beyond what police have deemed a “clean shoot” and the many ways they have sought to sway public opinion. There can be no perfect martyr in our quest for justice and we should not ask that of Brown.

We are only beginning to piece together what happened on Canfield Drive. The questions are many and we deserve answers to all of them. That is justice.

But, what you believe about a story is defined largely by when and how you believe it begins. And, for me, to unravel this piece of that history is to offer a spate of context. As I watch thousands of peaceful protestors, the rage of those few who have engaged in violence, and even how local law enforcement sought to address both—too often as one and the same– I see it through a cultural lens, as we all do. Mine was shaped and formed by my life in St. Louis, by the lives of my father and brothers—all lost on the streets of the city I love—and by the future I want to embrace for my sons and daughters.

“Let us keep the issues where they are,” Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. said so eloquently from the pulpit of Mason Temple the night before his assassination. “The issue is injustice.”

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>via: http://faultlinesjps.com/2014/08/27/ferguson-an-american-apartheid/?blogsub=confirming#subscribe-blog

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August 28, 2014

On growing up in Ferguson and Palestine

By Naomi Shihab Nye

The author and her family in Ferguson. (Courtesy of Naomi Shihab Nye)

I grew up in Ferguson, Mo.  No one ever heard of it, unless you lived elsewhere in St. Louis County.

Then my family moved to Palestine – my father’s first home. A friend says, “Your parents really picked the garden spots.”

In Ferguson, an invisible line separated white and black communities. In Jerusalem, a no-man’s land separated people, designated by barbed wire.

* * *

My father and his family became refugees in 1948, when the state of Israel was created. They lost everything but their lives and memories. Disenfranchised Palestinians ended up in refugee camps or scattered around the world. My dad found himself in Kansas, then moved to Missouri with his American bride. He seemed a little shell-shocked when I was a child.

Ferguson was a leafy green historic suburb with a gracious red brick elementary school called Central. I loved that school, attending kindergarten through sixth grade there. All my classmates were white, of various derivations – Italians, French-Canadians, etc. My father was the only Arab in Ferguson. But he ran for the school board and won. 

At 12, I took a berry-picking job on “Missouri’s oldest organic farm” in Ferguson. I wanted the job because I had noticed that the other berry-pickers were all black boys. I’d always been curious about the kids living right down the road whom we hardly ever got to see.

We had contests to see who could pick the most in the searing humidity. I had obliterated Ferguson’s “line.” I felt a secret pride.

My mom often warned, “Be your best self.” This seemed odd. 

It would be 1968 before the Supreme Court ordered U.S. states to dismantle segregated school systems and Ferguson began mixing it up. We were gone by then.

* * *

In 1966, my father took our family to the West Bank. I was the only non-Armenian attending the ancient Armenian school in Jerusalem’s Old City. It was fine to be “the other” for a change, but I wished we could have Jewish friends too. And I wished the Jewish Israelis we weren’t seeing across that line could know the families of Palestine as we did, sharing their humble parties under blossoming almond trees.

Our father said that, when he was a boy,  Jews and Arabs had been mixed together, neighbors. Now there was power and domination at stake.

Dominate – to exercise control over. Black kids in streets. Thousands of Palestinian families.

In 1967, with the Six Day War brewing, my family left Jerusalem. We settled in San Antonio, a majority Latino city, which felt like a relief.  White and black people were minorities. There weren’t any lines. Maybe in the air, and in history. But people kept crossing them.

My father, a newspaper journalist, eventually left San Antonio for another paper, I ended up attending college here and have remained until now. We have our first African American female mayor in history.

Back in Israel/Palestine, nothing improved for the Palestinians and they were always blamed for it. A gigantic ominous “Separation Wall” was built.  Americans elected a half-and-half president twice, which gave many of us great hope.

Summer 2014, the news exploded.   

Massacres in Gaza – not the first time – people who looked exactly like our Arab families. Regular people. Kids. Sleeping kids. No tanks, no army, no due process of any kind, but they were blasted out of their lives.

Was anyone civilized? A Jewish friend sent me a one-word message that he seemed to be sending out to everyone he knew: STOP!  

What could we do?

Of course, we wished Hamas would stop sending reckless rockets into Israel, provoking oversized responses. Why didn’t the news examine those back stories more? Oppression makes people do desperate things. I am frankly surprised the entire Palestinian population hasn’t gone crazy. If the U.S. can’t see that Palestinians have been mightily oppressed since 1948, they really are not interested in looking, are they? And we keep sending weapons and money to Israel, pretending we’d prefer peace. 

We send weapons to Ferguson, too.

After unarmed teenager Michael Brown was shot, quiet old Ferguson took over the news. Citizens marching, chest placards, “I’M A MAN TOO” “DON’T SHOOT.” It’s easy to see how delusions of equality in Ferguson – where a white officer might raise a gun against an unarmed black kid – are simply wrong.

Why is that harder for people to see about Gaza? 

People in Gaza actually sent messages of solidarity to Ferguson – Internet petitions signed by Gazan citizens. I thought I was hallucinating. What if they could all march together? 1.8 million Gazans would really clog old Florissant Avenue. 

To my knowledge, Israelis have never yet been called militants by the American press, even when they blast whole families to oblivion.  It’s just “defense.” A newscaster described Ferguson as “a series of stings and hurts.” Try the open-air prison enclave of Gaza for stings and hurts.

On the news, a Kuwaiti running a Ferguson grocery says his store has been looted. I think, “He’s the Arab there now.” 

Things will change again in Ferguson. Historic inequities in that community will be reexamined, no one will be able to pretend they don’t exist. But will we examine them in other communities too? 

Will things change for Gaza? If they don’t, this nightmare of worst selves will keep happening and happening. Look, it already has. And what gets better? Will the United States ever speak out in solidarity with scores of exhausted people burying their dead, staring up with stunned eyes, mystified?

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>via: http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/28/on-growing-up-in-ferguson-and-gaza/